Havana to Rock with the Stones on Good Friday

Dmitri Prieto

HAVANA TIMES — The Rolling Stones are coming. They will play on the night of a holiday, Good Friday.

The Cuban State declared this day a holiday four years ago, as a show of respect towards members of the Catholic Church (and, I assume, other Western Christian communities), who, that day, commemorate the violent death of Jesus of Nazareth at the hands of the earthly powers of his time.

It is supposed to be a day of recollection…for those who believe, of course.

Well, now, in addition to an opportunity to recollect the assassination of Jesus Christ, we will have a chance – that same day – to enjoy a Rolling Stones concert.

Like the Church, rock and roll has finally also earned the respect of the Cuban State for itself.

Someone will surely interject that, like religion, attending the concert is a matter of personal choice, such that anyone who doesn’t wish to go (down the Way of the Cross or the concert) is entitled not to.

The only “mandatory” part of all this is the holiday, but one is generally grateful for that, beyond the rock and roll or Christian sympathies (or both) a person may have.

I am not complaining, I am simply surprised by the incoherence of it all. Such contradictions, I know, aren’t news in Cuba, particularly after Obama’s visit.

Beautiful and incompatible images are colonizing Cuban brains and hearts, or perhaps they have been colonized for decades. Could it be an expression of that phenomenon called “transculturation”?

I recall those pamphlets dished out by pro-government bloggers, with suggestive titles such as “Obama Centralizes the Media War against Cuba.”

Today, the central role Obama has secured for himself places him next to Cuban sit-com idol Panfilo and the best intentions of the Cuban government.

But we can’t ask the impossible.

Incoherence, spectacle. Cuba, a platform for historical encounters – Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro, Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill, old rock legends and the Rolling Stones, decision makers and normalizers of Cuba-US relations and reactivators of reprisal mobs.

Perhaps, in the near future, a trendy Cuban reggaeton band will play next to the National Symphonic Orchestra of Havana, or with New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.

Anyone who defends reconciliation would certainly be happy about this. But I can’t share in this happiness, I apologize!

Someone else, someone who perhaps recalls perestroika, would see, in this incoherence, a sign or a seed of the changes to come.

As for me, I cannot help but see something quite simple in all this, something which, I apologize for the word, stinks: a terrible lack of taste.